Stockton Heath Primary School

OPAL is a huge part of our school day at Stockton Heath Primary School and both children and staff look forward to getting outside to play, explore and develop together.

We are committed to ensuring quality play opportunities are available to all our children and believe that play is essential for physical, emotional, social, spiritual and intellectual development of each child. Most of our best childhood memories are from playing outdoors, climbing trees and exploring the wide world around us. OPAL gives us the opportunity to give those memories to your children. OPAL (Outdoor Play and Learning) is all about using naturally and man made resources to allow children to be inspired and creative at playtime.

Given the importance of play in children’s lives and current concerns about children’s health and opportunity to access time and space to initiate their own play outdoors, there are considerable benefits for children, parents, school and the wider community from participating in OPAL’s programme. The OPAL Primary Programme supports schools in developing a cultural shift in thinking about and supporting children’s play.

Its success comes from a series of interrelated actions undertaken with specialist support from our OPAL mentor. This embeds play into school’s policies and practices and establishes clear guiding principles and strategies for initiating changes at playtimes. The results can be transformational and – at best – spectacular and show progress even in more challenging school environments.

Through our OPAL provision, we help meet children’s fundamental needs and as a result, have many more children who are happy and engaged with improved behaviour during play. 

Come and join our OPAL journey!